In our society most people are overwhelmed by the deluge of information that is delivered to them. Every day, newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and the Internet each provide more information than any person could ever assimilate. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that each of these media, albeit to different degrees, deliver information to people for whom that information is unlikely to be of interest, and, therefore, each person must spend a considerable amount of time and effort just culling information of interest from information that is not of interest.
Increasingly, technological solutions are employed to cull information that is likely to be of interest to a given person from information that is unlikely to be of interest. For example, some Web sites enable a user to custom tailor a daily electronic “newspaper” that only contains news items that relate to the user's interests. In these cases, the information is filtered based on the nature of its content. For example, a user could indicate that he or she desires news relating to business but not news relating to sports.
Another criterion for culling information that might be of interest to a user from information that is unlikely to be of interest is based on geography. By its very nature, the utility of some kinds of information is at least partially related to geography. For example, a report of traffic congestion on the Golden Gate Bridge is more likely to be of use to those in the San Francisco Bay metropolitan area than it is to people in New Zealand.
Traditionally, each type of media has, to one extent or another, naturally culled out geographically-sensitive information that is unlikely to be of interest to its audience. For example, most newspapers have editorial policies that prefer information about the area where they are published than information about distant areas. In contrast, many Internet Web sites tend to be much less parochial, which is, of course, both the weakness and the strength of the Internet.
Although some technological solutions exist for culling information based on geography, the need clearly exists for improved systems that cull geographically-sensitive information that is likely to be desired from geographically-sensitive information that is unlikely to be desired.